I have recently started working with MaidSafe and one focus is to recruit Software & Rust Engineers who have commercial experience. Being brand new to technical recruitment I am on a steep learning curve at the moment and I am struggling to find many job boards/forums that are dealing specifically with Rust. I have come across this website however it doesn’t appear to be well used - https://rustjobs.rs/

If any of you were looking for a programming job using Rust where would you look?

one focus is to recruit Software & Rust Engineers who have commercial experience

When you say commercial experience, do you mean engineers that have been using Rust in their daily job for a for-profit company? I ask because Rust is relatively new language, so the chance of finding anybody with such experience is unlikely.

I often keep an eye on the HN who’s hiring threads. I’ve been seeing more and more rust jobs pop up there. If I was looking I’d also check the local user groups. In the Boulder/Denver area we are lucky to have two fairly active ones.

My current corporate master found me through a recruiter that is a mutual contact who didn’t even know I knew rust but just thought I’d be a good fit. That kind of luck isn’t a very scalable approach to hiring.

With Rust being relatively new this is our challenge in finding people. We as we are looking for people who are fairly proficient in the language who can get on board with our work quickly so the thought of having someone with commercial experience would fit well. I have just started to look at the recruitment process which is ever evolving so the commercial requirement could be dropped.

Apologies as my initial post suggested that we are looking for people who have been using Rust in their daily job for a company. What I meant is that we are looking for someone who has experience of working within a business and who also
has experience of Rust but not the two together. I hope this answers your question?

Commercial experience of working to tight deadlines as part of a team.

Skilled in producing clear and user-focussed documentation.

The ability to liaise with a growing community of enthusiasts.

Yep, that looks reasonable. Mandating commercial Rust experience at this stage in the ecosystem would be a definite flag for me as an employer with unrealistic expectations. If you wanted to widen your net a little, candidates fluent in statically typed languages like Haskell, Scala, or OCaml might also be able to pick up Rust in a reasonable timeframe.

I agree - the only thing missing is “Required: 10+ years of Rust experience” (snarky remark in jest).

I’m not even sure why commercial experience is needed - what if someone has extensive experience in using Rust for various OSS projects as a hobby? Rust knowledge is Rust knowledge, I’m not sure what commercial experience specifically adds - either you know it or you don’t (or willing to learn if the employer is OK with that and are otherwise a good candidate).

Depends on if the company has resources to spare on mentoring more juniors at the current time. Getting on your feet ‘in the industry’ when coming out of uni or hobby work can take a bit of adjustment, and a company needs to make sure their juniors are getting the support they need before taking on any more. Giving the company in question the benefit of the doubt, I would assume they already have juniors, but need to balance it out with some more mid-levels/seniors.

Sure, but my point is that if you need a senior person that knows Rust to lead/mentor junior devs then you can get that by virtue of hiring a senior person with any (pertinent) commercial/industry experience but who is also proficient in Rust due to, e.g., working on popular OSS libraries as a hobby.

I think the job posting as-is is fine if the company is willing to accept that the candidate pool matching those requirements is very limited. But like you, I also found the posting to be a “flag” of an employer with unrealistic expectations.

Anyway, @victoriarussell don’t mean to sidetrack this so ignore me and carry on .

@vitalyd Don’t worry, the feedback from everyone has been great. My role is not only to recruit but to also work out what is/is not working for us in regards to recruitment so the feedback you are giving me is much appreciated

Throwing a time limited 3-hour coding task and then simply answering, that provided solution is not acceptable (without any actual clarifications and/or interview), is not the way to interact with Rust engineers, IMO.

If you really would like to hire professionals, treat them as professionals, not just as code monkeys.

If you really would like to hire professionals, treat them as professionals, not just as code monkeys.

This is actually a very good point, we have used code challenges, but not so much for code capability, but for thinking capability. What I mean is there is generally a network type question and maybe one on XOR or other non euclidean number space. I though have great reservations, yes it does filter some people who are obviously not logical thinkers, but I feel it also means deeper thinkers are hindered. It is something we have been debating, short quick answers can be good but a longer time to solve (unrealistic to ask candidates to waste too much time though) often shows a person who can think deeply and create better fundamental algorithms.

So long and short is that these challenges are under scrutiny, I am not sure I could pass this and I have been there a while and do a lot of design, which can take 3 weeks of nothing and 1 hour of inspiration later, something really worthwhile appears. Therefore I agree with your premise, but also see the other side of a basic filter as well. I hope we are smart enough to catch that, but the challenge itself may be filtering the deeper thinkers and that is a big concern.

Got a response (Nov 3rd '16) no earlier than two months after sending in an application.
At which point I only bothered to respond to it as one of the challenges contained a couple of false assumptions/bugs.

@GuillaumeGomez@regexident sorry to read that you have not had a positive experience with MaidSafe - this is no means our intention. I have come on board to focus on recruitment so if you have an interest in the company you can send your CV in pdf format to careers@maidsafe.net and I can pick this up